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You are here: Home / Featured Story / The Memoir of a Female Soldier

The Memoir of a Female Soldier

March 3, 2023 By Deborah Anderson, Express Staff

Introducing March as American Heroine’s Month, it is fitting to feature our own official state heroine, Deborah Sampson, in a newly released book based on her life,
This historical novel is closely based on the true story of Deborah Sampson, a young Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man, enlisted in the Continental Army and fought during the American Revolution. Learn about the amazing young woman, brought up in poverty, who enlisted in the army to support herself. This well-researched story helps us learn about this remarkable woman.
Stationed at West Point for a year and a half, she was wounded fighting the Tory loyalists who terrorized the Hudson Valley and was promoted as an aide to a general.
Twenty years later, as a wife and mother, Sampson told her tale as the first American woman to do a lecture tour. In this fictional memoir, Sampson sets the record straight about her life and military service, seeking to overcome prejudice against her and to gain the respect due her.
Deborah grew up in Middleborough, as did Jan Lewis Nelson, the book’s author. In his foreword, the author’s husband, Steve Nelson, tells how Jan recalled first learning about Deborah from a substitute teacher in junior high school. It made a lasting impression on her, and 16 years later she began research for this book, working with local historian the late Charles H. Bricknell of Plympton.
This led to Steve and Jan getting married in the house in Plympton where Deborah was born and living there while Jan worked on her book in 1974. Publishers weren’t enthusiastic about her project so she put the book away while she raised their son and life took the family in another direction. After the author was treated for breast cancer, life slowed down for the Nelsons. Steve took out the old boxes of pages and helped his wife put them together for the book you have here.
Sampson was named the official Massachusetts state heroine in 1983. After receiving an honorable discharge, she received a military pension. She married Benjamin Gannett from Sharon and the couple raised three children. Four years after her death in 1827, Gannett applied for, and received a widow’s pension, the first man in the country to do so. He unfortunately died before he could collect it. Deborah Sampson Gannett and her husband Benjamin are buried in Sharon.
Massachusetts observes each May 23 as an anniversary commemorating Deborah Sampson Gannett’s enlistment in the Continental Army.
The book is available for sale on Amazon.com.

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